


The Straight Man Token Human and Awkward Frankenstein’s Slow Burn Romance

by Prim_the_Amazing



Category: Naruto
Genre: M/M, think sally from the nightmare before christmas, warning for kakashis gross fragile undead body
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-17 19:34:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11858238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prim_the_Amazing/pseuds/Prim_the_Amazing
Summary: Another example of Iruka’s shitty decision making: taking a creepy stranger that didn’t know what a handshake was, covered his entire body except for one eye with cloth because his “creator” said he was unsightly, and could jam his broken bones back into place without so much as a whimper tohis home.He’s going to be found chopped up into thirty bloody pieces in his bathtub, he swears to fucking god.





	The Straight Man Token Human and Awkward Frankenstein’s Slow Burn Romance

His creator swaddles Kakashi in layers upon layers of cloth. He covers every inch he can get away with. His slightly uneven legs, his feet that are missing some toes, his hands that have different skin tones from each other, his arms which his creator stole from a man who slashed long deep cuts across the length of his forearms, his chest with the stitched up cuts from an autopsy, his death-white hair, the empty eye socket that he wasn’t able to fill, his deathly pale skin, his _face…_

The less said about his face, the better.

“You can’t go outside,” his creator says. “You can’t let people see you.”

 _You aren’t ready yet,_ Kakashi infers. _You’re just a prototype. You’ll make me look bad._

Kakashi knows his creator. He isn’t doing any of this out of a sense of protectiveness. He sneers when he sees his imperfect stitching, body parts that don’t fit each other perfectly enough for his tastes, his pride.

He avoids his creator as much as it’s possible to avoid someone you live with. He doesn’t like the way the man talks to him (nothing but orders _hold your breath as long as you can_ and interrogative questions _do you feel hunger),_ looks at him (critical, finding fault after fault, tallying them up and adding them to a long growing list), even the way he touches him (rough and poking, adjusting, unsatisfied).

The house that is his world is dark and dusty. His creator keeps the curtains drawn and has forbid him from looking through the windows, but he remembers flashes of the world. He’s read some of the notes about him on the sly, his creator just leaves them out. He doesn’t think Kakashi can read, he suspects, and he isn’t in a hurry to dissuade him. Even his brain is collected from many different people. Nothing about him is whole.

The point is, he has memories. He vaguely remembers speaking English, Japanese, Polish, Spanish, and nothing else his whole life (besides a small smattering of French), _I don’t know any second languages_ even though he knows four like the back of his hand. He only speaks the one his creator speaks in front of him. He doesn’t know what explanation his creator came up with for that, and he doesn’t really care. His creator assumes a lot of wrong thing about his own creation. He’s a strange combination of ungodly smart and just plain stupid.

He remembers that the sky is blue-grey-black-pink-purple-orange, grass is fresh green-brittle rotten brown, sand is brown-yellow-orange-red, and the ocean is blue-green-dark like an oil slick in the night. The world’s so many different colors. His creator enjoys and welcomes a disappointing few of them into his home, Kakashi’s entire allowed world.

He remembers eating good food. Bad food. Little food. Lots of food. Smelling perfumes, garbage, dancing, not being able to stand up on her twisted legs, being so in love with a woman’s smile, _hating_ women because they don’t smile at him, working for painstaking hours on a single drawing, looking in awe up at paintings and wondering how artists did it. Snapshots.

They feel so insubstantial when he has nothing else to dwell on for hours and hours. He only “sleeps” a few hours a _week._

His creator leaves his notes out. He doesn’t think Kakashi can read.

 _He’s not going to fix Kakashi._ He’s not going to improve him until he’s presentable. He’s just keeping him around to study long term effects, see if any unforeseen problems crop up. He’s going to try again with a _new one._ He’s going to take Kakashi apart for parts, for autopsy, for study, to hide his embarrassing first try.

Kakashi leaves. He’s not sure why he never tried to before. His creator never seriously tried to lock him up inside the house because he didn’t think Kakashi would even think of disobeying and trying to escape (and he was mostly right, wasn’t he). He snaps the locks and breaks down the doors in his way _easily._ He’s strong.

It turns out his creator lives in the middle of a forest. Kakashi doesn’t think any of the people his brain is made out of were especially outdoorsy in life. He falls and horribly breaks his ankle almost immediately, bone jutting up out of flesh. He snaps it back into place and keeps going, his permanent limp a little more pronounced than usual.

He looks up at the stars as he walks. They’re brighter than his snapshots memories had him assume. He has to stop himself from looking at them the entire time, so he doesn’t break his other ankle. The air isn’t as… musty, as it had been back in the house. He’d forgotten that air could taste so… invigorating? Fresh?

He keeps walking. He walks until the stars fade out of sight and the sun rises, the sky bleeding all sorts of colors that make his chest hurt. _Pretty._ There hadn’t been anything pretty in the house. His creator was a man of utilitarian tastes. (Probably why he didn’t want an unnecessary second creation walking around, taking up space and resources, reminding himself of his mistakes.)

The pink is only just disappearing from the sky, the blue taking over, when he bumps into the second pretty thing of his life. The pretty thing falls down on his ass. Kakashi remains standing. He’s hardy.

“Oh, fuck,” the pretty thing groans, blinking dazedly before focusing his gaze on Kakashi. The pretty thing freezes. Kakashi freezes.

The pretty thing is so… _perfect._ Not hodgepodge like Kakashi, not old and bitter like his creator. He has brief snapshot memories of other people, blurry outlines and features, but this is, this is without compare. This has to be special. His hair is long and dark and smooth, not pale and bristly and long like dried grass like Kakashi’s is. His skin is tan and smooth, only a single symmetrical scar on his face breaking it up, and there’s no crooked stitching on it at all. It's healed.

“Um,” the pretty thing says, and then stands up slowly. He moves fluidly, like all of his parts interlock perfectly, and then he’s standing up already so soon after he fell. Kakashi hasn’t moved fluidly a single time in his undead life. His creator has joints that creak when he sits up. Kakashi thought people moving so easily had been a dream, fake misremembered memories. “Sorry for bumping into you.”

His creator’s voice rasps. Kakashi’s is a dry croak, like he’s always dehydrated. He remembers, faintly, people singing songs so clearly. The pretty thing’s voice is that kind of voice, something one of his unwilling brain-donors would have heard through their tinny radio while they’re driving somewhere Kakashi will never recall. Except there’s no tinny radio in the way, no vague memories blurring details, he’s _right there,_ speaking so clearly. It’s overwhelming.

“Hello…?” the pretty thing says uncertainly, standing a wary distance away from him. Kakashi doesn’t want him to leave.

Kakashi knows how to speak. His creator wanted him to be as complete as possible. He wanted him to be able to answer questions. Kakashi can answer questions. That was a question, he thinks.

“Hello,” he manages. Oh, wow, his voice sounds like _shit_ compared to the pretty thing’s. No wonder his creator was embarrassed of him.

The pretty thing blinks at him. “Are you okay?”

Another question, okay, he can handle this. It was pretty vague though. Kakashi wishes he’d asked him something more specific, like how his lungs were doing, if he felt any pains in his gut, if his heart was keeping up its rhythm.

“Operational,” he answers.

“What,” the pretty thing says.

“Operational,” he raises his voice, trying to speak more clearly.

“No, I heard-- okay, fine. That’s… great. Good to know. I’m Iruka-- shit!” he curses.

“Iruka Shit?” he asks, incredulous. His creator had never shied away from swearing around him, and he can swear fluently in four languages, and a little bit in French.

Iruka laughs a little, in a nervous, embarrassed sort of way. Kakashi still loves it. He hasn’t heard laughter his entire existence, can only barely dredge up the concept of it. Iruka has a nice laugh. “No, my name isn’t shit, I just, I shouldn’t give my name to random strangers I meet in the forest. No offense.”

“My name is Kakashi,” he says, even though he wasn’t asked and his creator doesn’t like it when he speaks without prompting. Iruka isn’t his creator. He can try out new things now, like answering questions that weren’t asked.

“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Kakashi,” he says and oh, oh, he likes that smile. Do that again.

Iruka sticks out his hand towards Kakashi. Kakashi stares at it. It’s empty. It isn’t touching him. He looks up at Iruka. “I don’t understand.”

Iruka stares at him. “It’s… a handshake?”

Kakashi stares at him for another long moment. Iruka doesn’t elaborate. “No, that’s a hand,” he finally says.

“A handshake is something you _do,”_ Iruka explains immediately, and then seems to pause and give him a strange look. “Have you seriously never shook hands with anyone before?”

“No,” he says honestly. No hand shaking memories come to mind. Maybe he doesn’t remember the world as well as he thought he did?

“... Put your hand in mine,” Iruka eventually says, and Kakashi does so. He doesn’t see why not, and he’s used to following orders anyways.

Iruka’s so _warm._ He can feel him even through his gloves, a faint warmth like the sun shining down on him, not quite touching, but affecting. Iruka’s fingers closes around his hand and he shakes it, up, down. He releases.

Kakashi wants to shake hands again, longer this time.

“You’re, uh, you’re sure bundled up well,” Iruka says. The only part of Kakashi’s that’s uncovered is his eye, and that’s only for necessity's sake.

“I’m unsightly,” he answers.

Iruka opens his mouth and then closes it. Repeats that a few times. “I’m sure that isn’t true.” His voice cracks, like the crystal clear radio station tuned into his musical voice just fritzed a little for a moment.

“Creator said so,” he says, but then he thinks about it for a moment. “He was wrong about a shocking amount of things,” he grants. “But I think he was right about that one. I’m all wrong.” Pieces that don’t fit together, like someone got impatient while putting together a puzzle and just started forcing pieces into slots they shouldn’t be in.

“... What,” Iruka says. “I think I have to go home now.”

He turns around and leaves, and Kakashi panics.

“Wait!” he says and walks as quickly as he can after him, not running, he can’t run.

Iruka turns around and looks at him, already a distance separated from him, and stares at the mechanical, stilted way he walks. Kakashi’s breath catches in his throat, and he tries to walk a little faster, a little more _natural,_ and--

His broken bone bends and spears out of his ankle again and he falls to the ground. Fuck. Shit. _Fucking shit._ By the time he manages to stand back up he’ll already be long--

_“Oh my god!”_

He’s back at his side _so fast._

Kakashi tries to look at Iruka’s face, but he’s prone and his neck can’t twist that much. Stiff. Too stiff.

“Are you okay!? Oh my god, oh my god…”

“It’s fine,” he says. “No significant damage.”

“I can see bone!” His voice is starting to sound less ethereal and more shrill.

Kakashi starts the slow process of changing positions from lying down on his stomach to sitting.

“Don’t move it,” Iruka says helplessly, hands hovering over him, but Kakashi continues. He sits up. Spares a look for Iruka. Concerned, panicked. His heart feels like it’s melting, sort of. No one’s ever looked like that for him.

“I’ll help you to a hospital,” he says shakily.

Hospital. Doctors with needles and questions and knives. “No thank you,” he says, and grabs his foot in one hand for leverage, the broken bone in the other (Iruka makes a small noise), and then he _snaps_ it back into position.

He looks at Iruka.

He’s never seen that look on anyone’s face before either.

* * *

 

Iruka doesn’t know why he makes the awful fucking decisions he makes. He’s a teacher. He’s supposed to teach children common sense for a living, along with a less important side of basic algebra and history.

For example: meeting a creepy stranger in the woods while hiking and almost immediately blurting his name into his face. Making _small talk_ with the creepy stranger instead of immediately turning tail and running. Leaving when said creepy stranger started spouting crazy shit was a start in the right direction, but then he had to turn around when he called out for him, see the awful way he limped like he’d been run over by a car and then thrown down the longest set of stairs straight afterwards, and then see the sickening way his bone had _jutted_ out of him.

And then he went back for the creepy stranger and he’d--

He’d done _that._

Another example of Iruka’s shitty decision making: taking a creepy stranger that didn’t know what a handshake was, covered his entire body except for one eye with cloth because his “creator” said he was unsightly, and could jam his broken bones back into place without so much as a whimper to _his home._

He’s going to be found chopped up into thirty bloody pieces in his bathtub, he swears to fucking god.

“Ummmm,” Iruka says to his probable future murderer. “Are you hungry?” _For my human flesh?_ Iruka bites the inside of his cheeks.

“I ate last week,” Kakashi says.

Iruka doesn’t know what to say to that. He doesn’t know what to say to a lot of the stuff Kakashi says.

He wishes Kakashi had said yes, so he could do something with his hands, so they’d have something to talk about. _How’s it taste? Okay._ Okay, fine, it probably wouldn’t have been a wellspring of conversational topics, but it would’ve _helped._ He flounders for something to do, and eventually his eyes land on Kakashi’s ankle, drawn there inexorably.

“Can I check your ankle?” he asks. He should do that, right? He queasily tries to suppress the images of what his ankle looks like under the layers of clothes.

“Yes,” Kakashi says.

Iruka looks at his ankle.

Kakashi remains seated at his chosen kitchen chair, and meanwhile Iruka works his boot off as gently as he can. He rolls down his sock and up his pants leg until he can see the wound. He stares at it.

He can still see the bone, is the thing. It’s back in place where it should be, but it's clearly visible through the hole in Kakashi’s flesh. There’s no clotting. There’s no blood at all. Entranced, he reaches out and carefully places his fingers on some of his skin around the wound.

It’s cold, lukewarm at best.

He snatches his hand back and just stares into space for a while, thinks. Can’t think. Looks up at Kakashi. He’s just looking at him silently with his hard-to-read covered face. He thinks he might see a spark of curiosity there in his eye, in the curve of his brow. And… dread?

“... I’m sorry I broke,” he spoke up.

“What?” Iruka says. He feels like he’s saying that a lot, today.

“I’m sorry,” he repeats. He’s got some smartass kids in his class who do the same thing, but he doesn’t think that’s quite what Kakashi’s doing.

“Kakashi,” he says, because he really doesn’t like that look on Kakashi’s face… in his eye. “This is _amazing.”_

“What?” He looks genuinely startled at that.

Iruka smiles, much like his smartass students do. “I said, this is amazing. You broke your ankle horribly and now it’s _fine._ You just popped it back in and now you can walk just like that.” More like limp, but still.

Kakashi looks like he might need a moment alone after that, so he says, “Hang on.” and leaves for his bathroom. Comes back, taking a little longer than he strictly has to, drags his steps and stomps when he’s nearing the kitchen to subtly announce himself, takes a moment to stare into his eyes in the mirror and fight back hysteria. “Spider-man or Hello Kitty?” he asks.

“I don’t understand,” he says.

Iruka shakes the bandaid boxes in front of his face. “Which one do you prefer?”

Kakashi’s eyes bounce helplessly back and forth between the two for a moment.

Iruka takes mercy. “No rush,” he says.

The bouncing gets a little less frantic. “... The pink one,” he says after a moment.

“I’m partial to that one myself,” he says with a grin, and kneels back down to his ankle. He takes hold of a loose flap of skin, reminding himself that he teaches _children,_ he’s touched far more disgusting things than this. He nudges it into place so it’s covering the bone, and then he pins it in place with a few bright Hello Kitty bandaids. Maybe he should’ve used duct tape instead.

He looks up at Kakashi’s, who’s looking down at his new pink accessories with something approaching delight.

Or maybe he made the exact right decision.

* * *

 

Kakashi sleeps as rarely as he eats. Iruka gets to keep him company a lot since it's summer vacation, but he doesn’t really feel comfortable dragging him out on the town when he’s got errands to run or introducing him to all of his friends (not that he’s keeping him locked up or anything-- he’s free to leave whenever he so chooses, and he made sure that Kakashi knows that), and Iruka needs to sleep.

“What do you do at night, when I’m not available?” Iruka asks.

“Look at the stars,” he answers.

“I can stay up with you tonight and teach you some constellations,” he offers.

“What are constellations?”

Iruka makes sure to brush up first. Google: man’s best friend, ignoring all of the informational theft, suppression, manipulation, and bribery.

“What do you do while I’m out on errands?” Iruka asks.

“I read,” Kakashi says.

He looks at his humble collection of books. Half of them are children’s textbooks. The next time he’s out, he makes sure to buy an entire cardboard box worth of paperback books for like a dollar from a bookstore that’s shutting down. He brings it home and says its for Kakashi.

“I don’t understand,” Kakashi says. He says that a lot.

“I just wanted to do something nice for you,” he says.

By the time he discovers a solid ninety percent of the books are trashy romance novels, Kakashi’s gotten so attached to the books Iruka doesn’t have the heart to take them away.

When Kakashi DOES eat, his tastes baffle Iruka.

“This is oatmeal,” Iruka says slowly.

Kakashi nods, like he’s committing the name to memory.

“One doesn’t usually put hot sauce on _oatmeal,”_ he says, speaking even slower.

Kakashi nods and continues pouring hot sauce out onto his oatmeal. He eats with his back to Iruka, but he can hear Kakashi making happy noises in between his bites. Iruka sighs. Good thing the grocery store’s got a sale going on, because it looks like he’s going to have to buy hot sauce in bulk.

Kakashi DOES NOT like fire.

“I just wanted to show you how to make smores,” he breathes, hand clutched to his chest. That hand had been previously holding a mini blow torch to melt the marshmallows with, but Kakashi had swiftly changed that reality with an unusually acrobatic kick. The blow torch was now firmly lodged in a wall ten feet away.

“Sorry,” Kakashi pants. “Maybe we can microwave it?”

They microwave it.

“Dear,” says his sweet old lady neighbour one day while he’s walking past to his house after having gone to Izumo’s birthday. “You should bring your new boyfriend in for tea some day! You _have_ to introduce us.”

“Uh,” Iruka says.

Sweet old lady neighbour smacks him playfully on the arm. “Oh come on now, dear, how blind do you think I am? I see him around, stargazing in the middle of the night and smelling the flowers in your backyard.”

Iruka laughs awkwardly and just walks away from the conversation with a stupid little wave.

When Kakashi DOES sleep, he sleeps like the dead. The undead. Ha.

“My life is spiraling out of control,” he tells Kakashi’s heavy sleeping form on his couch. “But in a very domestic sort of way.”

Kakashi’s breathing is always machine like, but it seems a little more so while he’s sleeping.

“Oh my god,” he says. “Do you know what I just realized?”

Iruka could scream all day into Kakashi’s ear and he wouldn’t so much as stir in his sleep.

“My life,” he says with an _eureka_ like realization, “has turned into a sitcom with a lame gimmick.”

He’d fallen asleep with one of his books half open on his chest. A woman in a corset hanging off a particularly hairy man is giving Iruka’s an offensively sultry look from the cover.

“We just need a couple more characters,” Iruka goes on. “A vampire airhead that lives in our attic, a swamp monster going through a midlife crisis in the basement, and a wacky monster hunting neighbour that visits without knocking to shout a few obnoxious catchphrases and then leave.”

He’d taken off his right glove to turn the pages more easily. The hand has a construction worker’s callouses.

“To accompany the straight man token human and awkward Frankenstein’s slow burn romance,” he jokes, badly. Kinda glad Kakashi had been asleep for that one, wow.

His eyelids slowly blink open, and Iruka freezes. When had he started waking up, how much of that had he heard--

“Good morning,” Kakashi says.

“Good morning,” Iruka says, smiles, and then flees to the kitchen.

One day, Kakashi kisses him on the forehead through the scarf wrapped around the lower half of his face.

“Whuh,” Iruka says. “I don’t understand.”

“I just wanted to do something nice for you,” Kakashi explains, and Iruka can see that he’s smiling.

Iruka goes ahead and introduces his weird creepy boyfriend that wears too many layers to his friends. It does not help him with the reckless reputation he’s been stuck with since college even though he’s been living as the most straitlaced guy to ever straitlace for years now. Not counting that time he started dating a Frankenstein.


End file.
